L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2015 www.italoamericano.org L'Italo-Americano 2 Continued from page 1 s c h o l a r s , t h e C o n s e r v a t i o n Institute for the conservation programs - make the Getty a unique and very special place. As you know, in Italy we have s o m e o f t h e m o s t b e a u t i f u l museums in the world, but we do not have a place where the life of a museum curator can be enriched and stimulated by the presence of these other related fields of scholarship. What did you bring to the Getty from your Italian edu- cation and previous profes- sional experiences? F i r s t o f a l l , I t h i n k I a m b r i n g i n g a f r e s h v i e w o f t h e p a i n t i n g s c o l l e c t i o n a n d t h e extraordinary enthusiasm for a new experience. Speaking about m y e d u c a t i o n a n d p r e v i o u s experiences, I would say that my scholarly profile is charac- terized mainly by a profound attention to the cultural con- texts, to the reception of the works of art and to the history of collecting. I have a vision of art history as a whole, where painting, drawing, sculpture and the decorative arts are strongly i n t e r w e a v e d . T h e M u s e u m Departments with their curators a r e o n l y a r t i f i c i a l c r e a t i o n s which respond to a practical need, but I think that museum displays and exhibitions must be focused on showing to the gen- eral public the dialogue of the different art forms, pointing out their technical and expressive qualities but also their intrinsic unity in different historical peri- ods. Are you working on any particular project at present? In these first few months, I was committed to reshaping our painting galleries, especially the Renaissance galleries, where I tried to privilege the dialogue between painting and sculpture a n d b e t w e e n I t a l i a n a n d Northern Renaissance. I have in preparation a small exhibition, focused on French frames from Louis XIII to Louis XVI (it will open September 15th), ground- ed exclusively from our collec- tion. I was always attracted by the relation between paintings and frames, and conscious of how much a frame contributes to the appreciation and recep- tion of a certain picture. The evolution of the taste for frames in France from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth century is a particularly fascinating chapter in the history of the European picture frame. As a more long- term project, I am putting in schedule an exhibition focused on the great Venetian painter G i o v a n n i B e l l i n i ( c a . 1 4 3 0 - 1516), one of my favorite artists of the Italian Renaissance, and his depiction of landscape in small devotional paintings. Davide Gasparotto on the background of Portrait of a Halberdier by Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci). Photo courtesy of The Getty Museum

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